Don’t make me fill another form
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years in business online, is whatever you do, it’s got to be easy for your visitors and your customers.
- If you make them click too many pages to get to something, that’s bad.
- Making people hunt for something that should be clearly stated, that’s bad.
- Making people complete too many forms especially throughout the order process, that’s bad.
A while back, I purchased something from another Internet marketer. The process was fabulous overall. But for one thing, maybe I’m in this business that makes me so picky. I just wished the marketer had made it just a little bit easier for me. Here’s how the process goes.
- Click checkout
- Pay
- You are returned to the merchant’s thank you page
- The thank you page told me to enter my user name and email address – the same one used for the order to complete the process. That is how the order will be delivered to me. The minute I ‘get on this list’.
I looked up at the URL of the page and I saw something like this:
http://orderprocessorservice.com/thankyou.html?name=lynette&email=email@address.com
As a ‘technical’ person, I know the information after the question mark are valuable. Why? Because they can be pulled in and used to pre-populate the form the seller is telling me to complete. Instead of making me fill in the form again, the thank you page would ask me to check the name and email address in the form and press submit. Much easier for the customer.
If you want to take it a step further, you can even make the form submit itself. Keep in mind this is frowned upon by some mailing list providers so making the client press the submit button could keep you out of hot soup.
I know marketers want to make it simple for themselves and easy. Especially if you are not technical minded. But if you are re-working your order process this is something you might want to take into consideration. This is something that is extremely easy to do for your tech assistant and won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Seriously.
Not all payment systems can pass information like that. In this case, I happened to notice it was Clickbank. So if you use Clickbank and make people sign up to a list before receiving the product consider pre-filling the form with information they already entered early in the order process.
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Not quite on topic, but i’ve installed google chrome(google’s new web browser for the uninformed),
and what i find strange is that it doesn’t auto fill forms like all the other browsers do, so i have to constantly keep re-typing my info – even though there google toolbar add on has an auto-fill feature.
i hope they make this optional in the future, cause i haven’t used my other four browsers since(what? i design websites so i gotta test em in all four to make sure they look right, lol)
cheers, just joined you on twitter. (actually i just joined twitter about a minute ago)
Not quite on topic, but i’ve installed google chrome(google’s new web browser for the uninformed),
and what i find strange is that it doesn’t auto fill forms like all the other browsers do, so i have to constantly keep re-typing my info – even though there google toolbar add on has an auto-fill feature.
i hope they make this optional in the future, cause i haven’t used my other four browsers since(what? i design websites so i gotta test em in all four to make sure they look right, lol)
cheers, just joined you on twitter. (actually i just joined twitter about a minute ago)
I’ve been dragging my feet testing on Chrome but there’s no escaping it 🙁 I’ll be on the lookout for that behavior now that you mentioned it. If that is true oh woe to us as we will have to jump through more hoops to pass data between pages.
I’ve been dragging my feet testing on Chrome but there’s no escaping it 🙁 I’ll be on the lookout for that behavior now that you mentioned it. If that is true oh woe to us as we will have to jump through more hoops to pass data between pages.
Indeed, it’s almost as if the first version intentionally treats your pc like a public pc when it comes to forms.
Now don’t get me wrong it does save passwords, but not form data.
What i like most is that it does track the pages you visit and automatically recommends the most used pages with thumbnails as well as recent bookmarks and recent history all on one page.
Just hope they fix the tiny issues in the next release. I’ve been using it 99% of the time since day one of it’s release. But i have IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari cause i’m a web developer and need to make sure my sites work properly in all of them.
Indeed, it’s almost as if the first version intentionally treats your pc like a public pc when it comes to forms.
Now don’t get me wrong it does save passwords, but not form data.
What i like most is that it does track the pages you visit and automatically recommends the most used pages with thumbnails as well as recent bookmarks and recent history all on one page.
Just hope they fix the tiny issues in the next release. I’ve been using it 99% of the time since day one of it’s release. But i have IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari cause i’m a web developer and need to make sure my sites work properly in all of them.
Thanks for the update Michael. I do hope so too. We have too much work making things compatible as it is.
Thanks for the update Michael. I do hope so too. We have too much work making things compatible as it is.